The prior art has put forth several designs for electronic personal devices for visually impaired individuals. Among these are:
U.S. Pat. No. 7,930,212 to Susan Perry and Richard Herbst describes an electronic talking menu system for the visually impaired. The system includes a battery powered portable electronic audio output device having large back lighted buttons corresponding to menu items. Each button corresponds to contents of a restaurant's menu such as appetizers, drinks, seafood or desserts. Pressing a particular button activates a prerecorded description of the menu item or menu items within the selected category. An electronic menu system provides a system for enabling a visually impaired person to review and select desired menu items using audio feedback. Delivery of prerecorded content is accomplished with either a logically managed service wherein formatted sound files are uploaded to a memory card from a personal computer via the Internet or a courier based service wherein formatted memory cards are delivered to restaurants via a third party parcel delivery service with a round robin mailer to exchange memory cards.
US Patent 2005/0140544 to Pierre Hamel, Manon Gaudet, Daniel Chabot and Marc Laframboise describes a system for orienting and guiding visually impaired pedestrians. The system combines a Global Positioning System or GPS receiver to a dead reckoning unit that compensates for GPS imprecision and loss of signal. The system is highly portable and is based on a handheld portable computing platform that communicates wirelessly with a self powered strap containing the GPS receiver and the dead reckoning unit. The system also uses wireless protocols to receive additional orientation information from a remote location server or operator accessible through the internet. A positioning algorithm for mapping the user near a street intersection is provided.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,502,032 to George H. Newman describes a global positioning system that actively guides blind pedestrians, and military and police forces. This system uses DOD Global Positioning System or GPS to provide user position and navigation to centimeter accuracy. Present position and navigation requests are digitally cellular telephoned to a central base station where data is correlated with a computerized map database which holds names and coordinates of specific locations such as streets, intersections, traffic lights, hospitals, bathrooms, public telephones and internal layouts of major buildings and facilities in selected regions, cities and neighborhoods. System operates by user entering desired destination into hand held unit via voice recognition software or using Braille keyboard. Hand held unit then transmits present position or PP GPS satellite signals and desired destination to a base station which contains map database and surveyor quality GPS computer system.
None of these prior art references describe the present invention.